Chapter 26 is in the queue for Saturday morning. I just did a quick re-read of it, to make sure that we'd missed nothing obvious. I'm sitting here going, what is this, Jason Bourne or something? Who wrote this stuff? Oh, yeah, I did.
I was writing a scene last night, and I got to wondering about something. So, I started doing some digging. First question was incredibly quick and easy - simple Duck Duck Go search. What's the exhaust temperature of the main engines on the space shuttle? It's 3300 C. Quick, painless, and easy. Okay, what's the exhaust temperature of the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Motors (aka the SRBs)?
Three HOURS later, I finally found the answer. It's not on any NASA site that I could find, it's not on Wikipedia, it's just not out there. I FINALLY found it on a site that was comparing the SRB to the Ariane-5 rocket. Mind you, I only needed it for one simple line in the scene I'm writing, but ... dammit, if I write it, it's going to be right!
Oh, and it's 3,600 C, in case anyone wonders. There were multiple websites out there discussing the brightness of the flame, due to the aluminum perchlorate burning, versus standard LOX-LH flames, but only ONE that I could find with an ACTUAL temperature. (I even found a couple complaining that the temperature wasn't out there.) I also now know more about the channels they used to deflect the flames during launch as well and how they were degraded after each launch, and the RS-25 engines of the shuttle were hotter than the F-1 engines of the Saturn V. And now, so do you!